No 20 Arts is delighted to present SMALL WORLDS, the first exhibition of Tom de Freston’s drawings. Long an admirer of Maurice Sendak, Jon Klassen, and Leonora Carrington, and having built a career around the construction of multimedia worlds, it is little wonder that de Freston has turned his hand to illustration in the past five years.
From jointly creating stories around miraculous animals with his wife, novelist Kiran Millwood Hargrave, to being selected to make work for the first illustrated edition of David Almond’s iconic Skellig, he has brought his full range of process to paper. Monoprinting, collaging, maquettes, and painting combined with interplays of scale and texture give each finished work depth and intrigue. His fierce belief in an image’s ability to communicate complex narrative is on full display here, made no less complex by the size, simplicity of line, and colour palette.
These are works that illuminate rather than illustrate the texts they accompany, and shown in isolation their power is evident. Populated by the uncanny, the sublime, and the strange, they act not as mirrors but windows to the text, opening out onto wider vistas. As de Freston himself says, these works exist not to ‘[lock] down a reader’s own version, but rather [expand] the architecture of the spaces they might enter.’ We invite you into these spaces, these windows into small but mighty worlds.
